Esther Perel, a psychotherapist, award-winning podcast host, and bestselling author will speak virtually at CUBoulder on Feb.18. Perel is being hosted by the Distinguished Speakers Board, a CU Boulder student-led organization.

If you go

Who: Limited to 3,000 attendeesWhat: An Evening with Esther PerelWhen: Thursday, Feb. 18, 7 p.m.Where: Zoom

Register Now

The free event will take place on Zoom at 7 p.m. (MST) and is open to CU Boulder students (undergraduate and graduate), faculty, staffand residents of Colorado.Virtual attendees are asked to pre-register. Attendance is limited to 3,000 attendees, and preference is given to CU Boulder students, facultyor staff. Audience members are encouraged to submit questions for Perel via #EstherCU on Twitter or Facebook, which will be posed during a moderated Q&A following the speech.

Esther Perel is a highly distinguished speaker and psychotherapist, who has captured audiences with her enticing podcasts and books, said CU Boulder student Ally Roberts, chair of the Distinguished Speakers Board. Esthers insight in relationships and psychosocial health will challenge us to think critically about our own lives, especially in such an unprecedented landscape. DSB is bringing Esther to engage the CU community in a conversation, and give an opportunity to reflect on our own relationships.

Perel has hada therapy practice in New York City for more than 35 years. ANew York Times best-selling author of The State of Affairs and Mating in Captivity,Perel is recognized as one of todays most insightful and original voices on modern relationships.

Fluent in nine languages, Perel's celebrated TED Talks have garnered more than 30 million views and her best-selling books have been translated into nearly 30 languages. Perel is an executive producer and host of the award-winning podcast Where Should We Begin? She serves as an organizational consultant for Fortune 500 companies around the world.

Learn more on Perel's website.

The Distinguished Speakers Board is a student-run cost center of CU Student Government. The board strives to bring diverse speakers to campus that will intellectually challenge the student body, as well as spark meaningful dialogue surrounding relevant issues. Past speakers the board has hosted include Anderson Cooper, Trevor Noah, Bren Brown, Laverne Cox, Edward Snowden (via videoconference), Viola Davis, Scott Kellyand many more.

See the rest here:
Modern relationship expert Esther Perel to give virtual CU talk Feb. 18 - CU Boulder Today

Yesterday, Marty Baron announced that hes retiring as editor of the Washington Post, effective at the end of February. Baron arrived at the Post eight years ago after spells as executive editor at the Miami Herald and the Boston Globe (the latter immortalized by Liev Schreiber in Spotlight). In that time, the Post won ten Pulitzer prizes, was bought out by the billionaire Jeff Bezos, roughly doubled the size of its newsroom (which is still expanding), and adapted to the demands of the internet; the paper now has around three million digital subscribers, more than triple its 2016 total. Its long been rumored in media circles that Baron planned to step down sometime after the 2020 election. Yesterday, he told Paul Farhi, a media reporter at the Post, that his job is exhausting, and that hes ready to move on. With the internet being so big a part of it, its twenty-four/seven, three-sixty-five, Baron said. It means you never really get to disconnect.

In the hours after his announcement, tributes to Barons leadership poured in. Barton Gellman, a former national-security reporter at the Post (who is now at The Atlantic), praised Barons handling, in 2013, of the secrets that Edward Snowden leaked about the National Security Agency and shared with Gellman and others. I remember thinking he might throw me out of his office when I laid out my outlandish conditionsa windowless room, a heavy safe, encrypted email and so onfor bringing the Snowden documents to the Post, Gellman told Farhi, but every choice he made came from a place of courage and common sense and journalistic integrity. (That wouldnt be the last big national-security story that Baron would shepherd: in 2019, the Post published the Afghanistan Papers, a huge project revealing the deceptions behind Americas longest war. Thanks to the Trump news cycle, it did not get the sustained attention it deserved.) Jason Rezaian, a Post reporter who spent more than five-hundred days in jail in Iran, hailed Baron, who worked to secure his release, as a tireless advocate in public and behind closed doors. Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, who had a friendly rivalry with Baron, said he made every institution he touched better. Margaret Sullivan, a media critic at the Post, called Baron a truly outstanding editor and said that American citizens owe him a standing ovation. Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU, argued that during the Trump era, Baron made the Post a more essential read than the Times. I agree.

ICYMI: Vladimir Putin, Alexei Navalny, and journalisms power to drive protest

Not that everything has gone smoothly for Baronin recent months, in particular, the Post has had to reckon with newsroom tensions around issues of race, representation, and the treatment of its staff. A year ago this week, Baron suspended Felicia Sonmez, a politics reporter at the paper, and upbraided her for a real lack of judgment after she tweeted (innocuously) about a past rape allegation against the basketball star Kobe Bryant in the hours after Bryant was killed in a helicopter crash. Hundreds of Sonmezs colleagues signed a letter supporting her, accusing Post management of seeking repeatedly to control Sonmezs speech on sexual violence, and of failing to protect her after her Bryant tweet triggered a wave of threats and abuse against her. A few days later, Sonmez was reinstated; Baron pledged a review of the Posts social-media policies, but did not apologize. This was not an isolated incident: around the same time, the Daily Beasts Maxwell Tani reported that Baron had also censured Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer prize-winning Post journalist, over his tweets about media coverage of race. At the time, Lowery did not directly address the story, but did tweet asking, Whats the point of bringing diverse experiences and voices into a room only to muzzle them? He has since left the Post for CBS, and been a leading voice in the industry-wide debate about the meaning of objectivity. (Yesterday, Lowery tweeted a smiley face twenty minutes after Barons retirement was confirmed.)

Last April, the findings of a report about the Posts social-media policies circulated internally; it concluded, based on interviews with staff, that management may be quicker to forgive the indiscretions of white men and newsroom stars than those of women, minorities, and less high-profile reporters. Such inequities havent been limited to social media. In 2019, the Posts union conducted a pay study and found that women and people of color in the newsroom earned less than white men; last summer, a number of Black journalists who had left the Post spoke out, online and in interviews with Ben Smith, the media columnist at the Times, about what they perceived to be barriers to their professional advancement at the paper. This place just seems to run off its best people, Soraya Nadia McDonald, who left the Post for The Undefeated, a site owned by ESPN, told Smith. (In the same, mammoth story on tensions at the paper, Smith reported that Baron killed a story that Bob Woodward wanted to run outing the then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a liar, and was left infuriated by an article the Post ran about people getting high before watching the movie Cats, which he felt glorified recreational drug use.) The Post has since filled new editorial roles focused on raceincluding the post of managing editor for diversity and inclusion that was filled by Krissah Thompson, a veteran of the paperbut, as Business Insiders Steven Perlberg reported recently, numerous Post staffers feel that the internal reckoning is incomplete. In his exit note, Baron acknowledged that, despite progress, the Post still needs a wider diversity of life experiences and backgrounds represented in our newsroom and reflected in our coverage.

Barons departure doesnt just come at a natural inflection point in the national political news cycle, but at a moment of philosophical introspection for the news business. The calls for a new approach by Lowery and others have often been caricatured, by traditionalists, as a capitulation of rigor and fairness to subjectivity and opinion, but in reality, rigor is central to the reformers visionrecognizing the flawed assumptions of the old model of objectivity isnt inimical to hard-hitting journalism, but should bolster it. The Post isnt the only outlet to have initiated a changing of the guard since this broader conversation started, but it is the most powerful to be seeking a new top editor, and the paper now has an opportunity to prove that righting the errors of Barons approach will only strengthen his legacy as an editorial powerhouse. As Smith noted last year, Barons tenure has been defined by a steadfast adherence to the longstanding rules of newspaper journalism and the defense of the institution. I wrote at the time that assessing the merit and continued relevance of those rules requires seeing them as separate from the institution. That will soon be someone elses job.

Below, more media jobs news:

Other notable stories:

ICYMI: How much do we need to know about domestic terrorists?

More here:
Marty Baron and a turning point for the Washington Post - Columbia Journalism Review

Pray for the best

Although I have not watched the inauguration of President Joe Biden, I do have some concerns that I hope his administration will address.

Trump pardoned some despicable people and didnt pardon those deserving of pardons. Will President Biden pardon Julian Assange who is dying in Belmarsh prison in London? Or Edward Snowden in Russia? All they did is reveal things the U.S. government did not want the public to know war crimes and spying on U.S. citizens.

After four years of Russiagate allegations, will Biden restore vital diplomatic relations with Russia and restore vital nuclear arms treaties? These treaties make the world safer as to prevent an accidental nuclear conflagration. Will he renounce first use of nuclear weapons and stop the trillion dollar program to create new and better nukes?

Will Biden address the question of Israeli human rights violations and restore funding to the Palestinian refugee organization, UNRWA, which was defunded under Trump? Or will he continue to satisfy Israels wildest dreams as Trump did?

Will Biden address any of the vast problems that led to Trump being elected in the first place or will he continue to ignore them as the Democratic Party has done for so long? Pray he will not continue endless wars and sanctions on countries that have not attacked us. Will he restore the Iran peace deal, the JCPOA? Can only pray for the best.

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Letter: Pray for the best | Opinion | news-journal.com - Longview News-Journal

Last month, the private security firm FireEye discovered a widespread breach of government and corporate computer networks through a so-called "supply chain" exploit of the network management firm SolarWinds, conducted by nation-state-level hackers, widely thought to be Russia. Most coverage of the breach featured ominous headlines and quotes from current and former government officials describing it as the biggest hack of modern times. Occasionally, buried in one of the closing paragraphs, there was an official quoted admitting that, so far, only "business networks" were known to be compromisedsensitive but unclassified email systems and data on job descriptions and HR functions.

"Like our nuclear policy before it, the stated goal is deterrence, but the actual goal is to create a cover for unchecked aggression and dominance."

These stories lack context of the true state of cyber espionage over the last few decades. The SolarWinds hack is certainly a large and very damaging breach, but one could almost pick at random any five or ten of the hundreds of codename programs revealed in the Snowden documents that would top it. The mother of all supply chain attacks (that we know of publicly) may have been the clandestine American role behind CryptoAGwhich allowed the NSA to sell scores of foreign governments broken cryptographic systems through which it was possible to crack the encryption on their top-level government and military communications for decades. And of course the first, and one of the only, actual cyberattacks in history was the Stuxnet program conducted by Israeli and American services against Iranian nuclear centrifuges.

Yet the American public may be left with the impression that Russian hacking poses a uniquely aggressive and destabilizing threat to the international order, and therefore must be punished. News coverage has been leadened with apoplectic quotes from senior officials and lawmakers that the breach represents "virtually a declaration of war," that we need to "get the ball out of their hands and go on offense," that "we must reserve our right to unilateral self-defense," and even that "all elements of national power must be placed on the table" (All elements? Tanks? Nuclear weapons?). This kind of hyperbolic reaction cannot be driven by sincere shock at the idea of a government hacking into and spying on another governments networks. More plausibly, it is driven by outrage at the idea of any other nation challenging the United States' overwhelming dominance to date in network espionage.

The Pentagon has so far responded to the breach by proposing a rearrangement of the organizational chart for our cyber army. And if history is any guide, Congress will respond as they have to past intelligence failures: by throwing more money at the bureaucracy to feed its legion of private contractors. In other words: more of what contributed to this breach in the first place. The ever-growing feeding frenzy for beltway bandits not only increases the attack surface for foreign hackers, it ensures that Congress does not have the capacity (even if it had the will) to understand and oversee increasingly complex supply chains to ensure basic security standards for the very companies who will be called on to fix these vulnerabilities. Few were even aware of the ubiquity of SolarWinds presence across so many of our government networks, and the lax security practices of this key software provider have only come under scrutiny retroactively. According to reports, the update server for SolarWinds softwarean incredibly sensitive key piece of any software supply chainwas publicly accessible by a default password that had leaked to the internet in 2019, and the company had been warned both by its employees and by independent security researchers.

Here another tragic irony emerges: whatever internal channels were used to warn of these security lapses were clearly not effective, but if a whistleblower had taken this kind of sensitive national security information to the presspublication of which perhaps could have forced action and prevented a major act of espionage against our governmentthey would have put themselves at risk of prosecution under the Espionage Act.

"If reports are true that Russia was behind SolarWinds, and was using its access to case physical infrastructure networks in the U.S., their motivation may have been to gain a small measure of deterrence against the overwhelming superiority of American offensive capabilities."

So while the pundits clamor for retaliation and Washington bickers about rearranging the desks at Fort Meade, we still do not get a debate on alternatives that might better serve the American people. In secret, and without public consultation, the NSA long ago decided to use our privileged position sitting atop the internet backbone not to secure it; to level up the safety of key systems for all its users (but to poke more holes in it); and to stockpile exploits and hoard vulnerabilities in order to dip its hands into nearly every network, communications protocol, and computer system of consequence on the planet, both foes and allies alike.

Even our defensive strategy has become a policy of aggression. Dubbed "defend forward," it has us maintaining backdoors and software implants on key infrastructure systems around the world, as a way of keeping a loaded gun pointed at any real or potential adversary. Like our nuclear policy before it, the stated goal is deterrence, but the actual goal is to create a cover for unchecked aggression and dominance. If reports are true that Russia was behind SolarWinds, and was using its access to case physical infrastructure networks in the U.S., their motivation may have been to gain a small measure of deterrence against the overwhelming superiority of American offensive capabilities.

The wisdom of such an aggressive posture towards the global internet was one of the key questions Edward Snowden posed to the public after his disclosures. We should not fail to consider it as we increasingly get a taste of what the rest of the world has been subjected to by American spies for decades.

Read more here:
SolarWinds Is Not the 'Hack of the Century.' Its Blowback for the NSA's Longtime Dominance of Cyberspace - Common Dreams

Paddy Cosgrave, CEO of tech conference Web Summit, recently sat down with Tarsus Group CEO and SISO Chair Douglas Emslie, to discuss the future of virtual and hybrid events.

As CEO of one of the worlds largest tech conferences, Web Summit, Paddy Cosgrave is familiar with the world of virtual and hybrid events. His company has been creating software to streamline the process of running large-scale, digitally connected events since it was founded in 2009, while also integrating that technology into the extremely successful Web Summits themselves.

Since the first Web Summit in 2010, the event has now grown to a global brand that welcomes 70,000 people to Lisbon every year. The company also runs sister events RISE Conference in Hong Kong, Collision in Toronto, SURGE in Bangalore and MoneyConf in Dublin.

Since the pandemic began, Web Summit has been forced to take all of its exhibitions and conferences into the virtual space, but it has more experience doing so than most. Web Summit is a highly tech-integrated show, where everything from registration to ticketing and interacting with stands is done through phone apps, QR codes and other kinds of technology.

Cosgrave recently sat down with Doug Emslie, CEO of Tarsus Group and SISO Chair, to discuss how his company organized a successful virtual edition of one its shows Collision at Home and how organisers and exhibitors can maximise their return on investment for virtual events.

Minglingand virtual tomatoes

Cosgraves key message was that the value of virtual events is to be found in one-to-one networking, not in endless streams of digital content. He stressed that what all exhibitors want from any event is lead generation, and this can still be achieved without face-to-face interaction. In fact, Cosgrave said that in many ways a purely digital event can provide more opportunities for one-to-one networking than a physical event.

You can hold more meetings online, when youre not walking from one end of a giant hall to another, so certainly it can be more efficient, he said. He then outlined how Collision at Home made use of a mingle feature which delegates could use at any time, whether during sessions or in dedicated networking breaks.

You can press a button and it launches a three minute call with who we think is the best person available at that moment for you to meet. And at the end of three minutes itll close and you can rate the call, and we use that feedback to refine the algorithm that matches you with other delegates.

We actually found the majority of people who attended Collision at Home were using these one-to-one interactions. People loved the idea that theres a three-minute clock, and when it runs out the conversation is just over. Because lets be honest, weve all been in conversations on show floors with people where youre thinking ok great great, I actually need to go youre too polite to cut it short. People loved the efficiency and the volume of people they could meet. And also we keep a record of who you met, so following up is very easy.

Alongside the mingle feature, Collision at Home allowed delegates to provide realtime feedback on speakers at the event. This included the ability to throw virtual tomatoes at speakers by posting tomato emojis in the chat. I think watching long streams of content on these platforms can get a bit dull, so just adding a bit of fun was important. It adds another realtime dimension, says Cosgrave.

Virtual return on investment

Moving on to the more serious topic of how online events can provide return on investment, Doug Emslie noted that many virtual events have struggled to provide value to exhibitors. Cosgrave agreed, and said that the first thing Web Summit did after cancelling their in-person events was to provide all exhibitors a full refund if they wanted, or the option to transfer to 2021.

We wanted to force ourselves to create value in our online conference. Its a false economy to partially charge people we needed to create a compelling experience that people were willing to pay for, he said. Because we build software as well as running events, we knew intuitively that Microsoft, Amazon, Mercedes, etc are primarily after lead generation. And we were able to deliver that with Collision from Home.

Perhaps it is this laser focus on providing digital networking opportunities that has allowed the company to continue thriving even during the Covid-19 pandemic. Cosgrave points out that Web Summit has let nobody go since March, and were continuing to hire relatively aggressively. Weve hired about 35 more people between March and now, overwhelmingly in engineering and related roles.

Online conferences can make money. The lights are still on. If you run a big event, you have to be able to create these bespoke experiences for your partners, and I think a lot of that is around giving people the chance to meet one on one.

Bono, Blair and Edward Snowden

Web Summit has grown into a very successful event, especially considering its relatively short history. Cosgrave says that in 2018, his team were offered 17m a year by the city of Valencia to relocate their event from Lisbon, and also received bids from cities in France, Germany and Italy. They ultimately decided to stay put in Portugal: Lisbon is an amazing city, and we know the people.

Emslie noted that Web Summit attracts a regular crop of high-profile celebrities both from the tech industry and further afield. The event has welcomed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, U2 frontman Bono, Tony Blair and Edward Snowden among others in previous years. But Cosgrave says he doesnt plan to use this popularity to expand outside of tech events. Instead, he sees things moving in the other direction.

I think every company is increasingly a software company. 120 years ago there were companies who said oh, well never use electricity. But of course everyone uses electricity, and youre daft if you dont.

In a dream world for me, the online conference platform is the first step to helping some of the biggest events in the world do everything from ticketing to registration to badging. Hopefully by 2022 or 2023 well be helping some very big shows with all the software needs they have. I think one of the problems with big shows is they have different software for ticketing, registration, an attendee app. They dont really talk to each other.

Youre using half a dozen different providers, but were trying to build the whole ecosystem. If anything comes out of all this, hopefully its that our software will start to be used by other people that organise large shows.

Read more:
Ascending the summit - Exhibition World